Bogen1989b
| Bogen1989b | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Bogen1989b |
| Author(s) | David Bogen, Michael Lynch |
| Title | Taking account of the hostile native: Plausible deniability and the production of conventional history in the Iran-Contra hearings |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA, Narratives, Testimony |
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| Year | 1989 |
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| Journal | Social Problems |
| Volume | 36 |
| Number | 3 |
| Pages | 197–224 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.2307/800691 |
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Abstract
This paper examines the video record of a segment of Oliver North s testimony before joint Congressional committees investigating the Iran-Contra Affair during the summer of 1987 and analyzes the constitutive relationship between the testimony and an emergent “master narrative” being assembled by committee investigators from a mass of documents and prior testimonies. The details of North's testimony display the witness's biographical relations to events in the past as well as his moral entitlements to speak about those events in the present circumstance. In contrast, the committees' conventional historical account is written in an anonymous voice as a chronology of objective events, validated testimony, and certified documents. The paper argues that analytic differences between conversational stories and conventional histories are used systematically in the generation of testimony. The paper first describes some of the discursive methods the interrogator uses to assimilate the witness's stories to a conventional historical account and then goes on to discuss how the witness is able to resist the movement from biography to history by embedding his stories within a set of local entitlements that resist translation into a generalized narrative.
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